Computed tomography is used, in particular in hospitals for generating volume images of a patient's body. Usually, a variety of body slices is imaged and stored in databases. Such databases need to store large amounts of image data. If a physician needs to check a patient's therapy or assess the medical condition of a patient, he or she has to download the relevant volume images. However, often only images referring to a particular body region are relevant for assessing a medical treatment or making a diagnosis. Conventionally, the physician has to browse through the entire set of volume images of a patient's body in order to allocate the body region of interest in terms of a partial volume image. A transfer of those large amounts of data, for example, to a local computer, requires a considerable amount of transmission bandwidth and local memory. Further, transferring the entire image data of a patient's body takes a lot of time.
Therefore, medical image databases have been supplemented according to the DICOM standard. This standard involves attaching a data field entitled “body part examined” to the volume image data. The field “body part examined” refers to one of a plurality of predetermined body regions, as for example “lung”, “hand”, or “thorax”. However, this labeling tends to be imprecise because the examined body regions are only referred to qualitatively, and all image slices corresponding to one volume carry the same “body part examined” flag.
Therefore, it may be desirable to provide an improved method or apparatus for managing and storing data, as for example medical image data.